Webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters needed only to submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.[5] The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server. A second program, known as an indexer, extracts information about the page, such as the words it contains, where they are located, and any weight for specific words, as well as all links the page contains. All of this information is then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.
Over the last 15 years, TopSpot has grown into the largest independent search marketing agency in Houston, Texas due to our passion for helping our clients grow. We understand that your website is often the face of your company and should make you look your best. We create digital strategies that help you reach your business goals & showcase who you really are. SEO, PPC, web design & development and analytics solutions are services we provide, but that's only the beginning.
By now, you've likely seen all the "gurus" in your Facebook feed. Some of them are more popular than others. What you'll notice is that the ads you see that have the highest views and engagement are normally the most successful. Use a site like Similar Web to study those ads and see what they're doing. Join their lists and embed yourself in their funnels. That's an important part of the process so that you can replicate and reverse engineer what the most successful marketers are doing.

Being a leading data-driven agency, we are passionate about the use of data for designing the ideal marketing mix for each client and then of course optimization towards specific ROI metrics. Online marketing with its promise of total measurement and complete transparency has grown at a fast clip over the years. With the numerous advertising channels available online and offline it makes attributing success to the correct campaigns very difficult. Data science is the core of every campaign we build and every goal we collectively set with clients.

To create an effective DMP, a business first needs to review the marketplace and set 'SMART' (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time-Bound) objectives.[60] They can set SMART objectives by reviewing the current benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) of the company and competitors. It is pertinent that the analytics used for the KPIs be customised to the type, objectives, mission and vision of the company.[61][62]

The world is mobile today. Most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. As a result, having a mobile ready site is critical to your online presence. In fact, starting in late 2016, Google has begun experiments to primarily use the mobile version of a site's content41 for ranking, parsing structured data, and generating snippets.

Today, one of the biggest trends driving the digital marketing world is responsive design. When a company’s content doesn’t perform well on a given device or browser system, the business behind it loses traffic and suffers decreased conversions as a result. Fortunately, video content is fit for consumption on all devices, ranging from computers to mobile phones. This expands video’s reach and makes it more user-friendly and consumer-focused.
Another ethical controversy associated with search marketing has been the issue of trademark infringement. The debate as to whether third parties should have the right to bid on their competitors' brand names has been underway for years. In 2009 Google changed their policy, which formerly prohibited these tactics, allowing 3rd parties to bid on branded terms as long as their landing page in fact provides information on the trademarked term.[27] Though the policy has been changed this continues to be a source of heated debate.[28]
To make your videos as memorable as possible, ensure that you’re keeping them in line with your brand strategy. This means keeping colors, fonts, logos and voice the same in your video marketing as they are in your blogs and articles. While videos do things text content doesn’t, users should still be able to recognize the style and format of your brand’s videos online.
Extras are unique to your needs — you might benefit from behind-the-scenes footage, a quick photo session, or certain types of b-roll. Get it done! Any content you can create on set during production will only benefit you. It can add more long term value to your clients and give you more content to post. If you work with an agency, ask them what they can do. You might even ask for raw video footage so you can continue editing and repackaging your video for future use. Think about your needs and see what you can do!
Another way search engine marketing is managed is by contextual advertising. Here marketers place ads on other sites or portals that carry information relevant to their products so that the ads jump into the circle of vision of browsers who are seeking information from those sites. A successful SEM plan is the approach to capture the relationships amongst information searchers, businesses, and search engines. Search engines were not important to some industries in the past, but over the past years the use of search engines for accessing information has become vital to increase business opportunities.[31] The use of SEM strategic tools for businesses such as tourism can attract potential consumers to view their products, but it could also pose various challenges.[32] These challenges could be the competition that companies face amongst their industry and other sources of information that could draw the attention of online consumers.[31] To assist the combat of challenges, the main objective for businesses applying SEM is to improve and maintain their ranking as high as possible on SERPs so that they can gain visibility. Therefore, search engines are adjusting and developing algorithms and the shifting criteria by which web pages are ranked sequentially to combat against search engine misuse and spamming, and to supply the most relevant information to searchers.[31] This could enhance the relationship amongst information searchers, businesses, and search engines by understanding the strategies of marketing to attract business.
Your viewer is now an actual customer! Your goal here revolves around keeping them interested in your brand for future purchases or added value. Any video that delights is a success — and the longer they watch, the more likely it is they’re delighted. The tone of your video here will matter greatly. Chances are a long, boring educational video won’t delight your customers as much as a funny, short, social media video will. Keep this in mind when reviewing your data: The view-through rate of a 15-second video will likely be much higher than that of a two-minute video.
You don’t want to “keyword stuff” and cram your core keyword and every possible variation of it into your alt attribute. In fact, if it doesn’t fit naturally into the description, don’t include your target keyword here at all. Just be sure not to skip the alt attribute, and try to give a thorough, accurate description of the image (imagine you’re describing it to someone who can’t see it – that’s what it’s there for!).
With Bing Ads, your accounts are free to set up and billing is flexible. You choose between a prepay or postpay option, as well as various payment methods. If you are uncertain about anything, there is free help to answer your questions before activating your campaigns. You can also pause campaigns at any time. Remember, you’re not billed until someone clicks your ad.
Instead, invest in an external hard drive like one of the Lacie Rugged models. External hard drives come in a variety of sizes and port options (Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, etc.). Multimedia creators will use the phrase “working off of an external” to describe storing all of their project files on this hard drive. This method also makes it easier to collaborate with teammates because you can easily share the drive.
Now, some buckets are worth more than others, and the three main buckets that you need to be aware of for search rankings are quality, trust and authority. So quality: what Google is trying to measure when they’re trying to figure out what sites should rank is offering something valuable or unique or interesting to googles searchers. For example: good content - if you are selling t-shirts and you are using the same description that every other t-shirt seller is using on their website then you are not offering anything unique to Google’s searchers. Even though your t-shirts might look pretty cool, the content is the same as everybody else’s, so Google has no way of telling that your t-shirts or your t-shirt site is better than anybody else’s. Instead, offer people interesting content. For example: offer them the ability to personalize their t-shirt. Give them information on how to wash it. What’s the thread count? Is it stain resistant? Is this something you should wear in the summer or is it more heavy for winter? Give people information, or even be more creative. Get people to share pictures of themselves wearing the t-shirt. Create a community of people who are interested in your product. Get a famous person to wear it and share that picture online. Do something different, do something unique. Show Google that you are different and better than the other search results.
Here, your main goal will likely be to attract new customers who are in the first stage of product research. You’ll want to show off not only the beauty of your product, but its utility and necessity. You’ll also want to highlight what makes your product better than the rest — since these new visitors are still doing research, you’ll want to make sure your product video sets you apart from your competition.
SEM is the wider discipline that incorporates SEO. SEM includes both paid search results (using tools like Google Adwords or Bing Ads, formerly known as Microsoft adCenter) and organic search results (SEO). SEM uses paid advertising with AdWords or Bing Ads, pay per click (particularly beneficial for local providers as it enables potential consumers to contact a company directly with one click), article submissions, advertising and making sure SEO has been done. A keyword analysis is performed for both SEO and SEM, but not necessarily at the same time. SEM and SEO both need to be monitored and updated frequently to reflect evolving best practices.
Most people need to take a step back and understand where money is even coming from on the web. Sharpe says that, when asked, most individuals don't actually even know how money is being made on a high level. How does Facebook generate its revenues? How about Google? How do high-trafficked blogs become so popular and how do they generate money from all of that traffic? Is there one way or many?

How you mark up your images can impact not only the way that search engines perceive your page, but also how much search traffic from image search your site generates. An alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if a user can’t view it. Your images may break over time (files get deleted, users have difficulty connecting to your site, etc.) so having a useful description of the image can be helpful from an overall usability perspective. This also gives you another opportunity – outside of your content – to help search engines understand what your page is about.

Do you need to move on from Lotus Notes? It’s a big decision and you need to ensure the project is successful.This step by step guide was developed to provide you with a plan once you have made the decision to modernize your legacy system. In this guide, we walk you through: ● How to audit your current portfolio ● Where do you want to migrate to? ● … Continue Reading...
Understanding Mobiles: Understanding mobile devices is a significant aspect of digital marketing because smartphones and tablets are now responsible for 64% of the time US consumers are online (Whiteside, 2016).[42] Apps provide a big opportunity as well as challenge for the marketers because firstly the app needs to be downloaded and secondly the person needs to actually use it. This may be difficult as ‘half the time spent on smartphone apps occurs on the individuals single most used app, and almost 85% of their time on the top four rated apps’ (Whiteside, 2016).[42] Mobile advertising can assist in achieving a variety of commercial objectives and it is effective due to taking over the entire screen, and voice or status is likely to be considered highly; although the message must not be seen or thought of as intrusive (Whiteside, 2016).[42] Disadvantages of digital media used on mobile devices also include limited creative capabilities, and reach. Although there are many positive aspects including the users entitlement to select product information, digital media creating a flexible message platform and there is potential for direct selling (Belch & Belch, 2012).[44]
When they’re considering buying something and want to research their options, there’s a variety of methods used. Some of the top tactics are a search engine, visiting a company or product’s official website, looking at review websites, and watching videos. Video could easily be incorporated into every one of those places, giving your brand a better chance of convincing the consumer.
Mini-documentaries Extended ArticleAnatomy of a Mini-Doc: What It Is and How to Knock It Out of the Park“Documentary” used to be a dirty word to the average viewer. Normally educational, often stodgy, and more than a little cheesy, documentaries were the… Read More are less about your brand’s visual aesthetics and focus more on expressing your company’s core value or mission statement in a documentary-style format. This is usually accomplished through interviews with key company representatives, like founders, employees, or satisfied customers.Client: RFK - School for the Visual Arts & Humanities (LAUSD) To make a big impression, it’s important your mini-doc keeps it short and sweet. You want to highlight excellent sound bites that tell viewers exactly who you are, all while maintaining their attention. While feature-length documentaries have enough time to develop a full, three-act story, mini-docs don’t. They have to establish their story by quickly answering three crucial questions: what, why, and how. What is the focus of this video? Why should the viewer care about this? How does your subject work? This helps you get key pieces of information to your audience in a fun and interesting way.
White balance tells your camera the color temperature of the environment you’re shooting in. Different types of light have different colors. For example, incandescent bulbs (like what many people put in a lamp) have a very warm color. The florescent lights (if you’re reading this in an office, look up) are a little bit cooler. Daylight is cooler yet. Before you begin shooting, you have to adjust your camera’s white balance according to your setup.
Paid channel marketing is something you’ve probably come across in some form or another. Other names for this topic include Search Engine Marketing (SEM), online advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Very often, marketers use these terms interchangeably to describe the same concept — traffic purchased through online ads. Marketers frequently shy away from this technique because it costs money. This perspective will put you at a significant disadvantage. It’s not uncommon for companies to run PPC campaigns with uncapped budgets. Why? Because you should be generating an ROI anyway. This chapter walks through the basics of how.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site's user experience and performance in organic search results. You're likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they're essential ingredients for any web page, but you may not be making the most out of them.
Next thing to know while learning what is Search Engine Marketing is, to be clear about different synonyms and acronyms related to SEM, as this may create many perplexities for the beginners. Actually, at the very beginning of Search Marketing the term ‘SEM’ was an umbrella term for Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Activities, but over the time, SEM solely refers to paid search. Below given is the list of some of the synonyms and acronyms that most of the ‘What is Search Engine Marketing Guides’ use to demonstrate SEM-
What is ​search engine optimization, then? It's not secrets or tricks — just ranking methodologies to follow in order to help a site that offers value to users beat the competition in search results. Today, you must be committed not just to optimizing your domain, but also to making it a quality site that attracts links naturally and is worthy of ranking.
When you ask your friends which online video platform they use, the answer you probably hear the most is YouTube. YouTube is the largest video hosting platform, the second largest search platform after Google, and the third most visited website in the world. Every single day, people watch over five billion videos on YouTube. It’s also free to upload your videos to YouTube and optimize them for search.
This is also about expectations. Anyone that tries to sell you a get-rich-quick scheme is selling you short. There is no such thing. You have to put in the time and do the work, adding enormous amounts of value along the way. That's the truth of the matter and that's precisely what it takes. Once you understand that it's all about delivering sincere value, you need to understand where the money comes from.
The next step? How will you communicate with people. Sharpe says that you need to decide on this early on. Will you blog? Will you use social media? Will you build a list by working with solo ad providers? Will you place paid advertisements? What will you do and how will you do it? What you must realize here is that you have to get really good at copy writing. The better you get at copy writing, the more success you'll find as an internet marketer.
Ask some SEO companies about SEO and they'll try and blind you with science and confuse you into thinking it's a black art. Say to some companies what is SEO and two hours later you'll be none the wiser. Not so here at Red Evolution. We love seeing the light bulb go on when our clients get it. We prefer our clients to not only know what we are doing for them, but why!
With our exclusive community forums you benefit from the experience and wisdom of hundreds of industry professionals who have boosted the sales, profitability, and overall performance of thousands of websites. With search, when you increase traffic you increase profits. This is true for mom and pop websites and large corporations. The traffic scale is only limited by your ambitions and the quality of the information you consume.

FGM Internet Marketing, LLC is a digital marketing and web design company based in Columbia, SC. We have over a decade’s worth of experience working on local, national and international online marketing campaigns, but our passion is helping local businesses grow. FGM Internet Marketing’s suite of online marketing channels will make your business more visible on the web, increase traffic to your website, and convert this into leads and sales.

There is a heap of sales clutter on the Internet that is actively annoying and repelling your customers. Don’t let your brand be that guy – instead, your video should be centred around the story and not the sale. Remember: the same rules that apply for written content marketing apply for video marketing – concentrate on the value you’re providing for your customers.
Maintenance. Ongoing addition and modification of keywords and website con­tent are necessary to continually improve search engine rankings so growth doesn’t stall or decline from neglect. You also want to review your link strategy and ensure that your inbound and outbound links are relevant to your business. A blog can provide you the necessary structure and ease of content addition that you need. Your hosting company can typically help you with the setup/installation of a blog.

Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.

As you know, other social media sites also offer a video experience, including Vine, Instagram, and Twitter. These sites are perfect for even shorter content, since Vine videos can only be 6 seconds long, while Instagram Twitter videos can be around 15 to 20 seconds. This may sound scary, but short video lengths force marketers to practice the art of brevity; if the content isn’t fundamental to your message, what’s it doing in there? The human attention span is considered to be only 8 seconds long, so you can look at it this way: your short videos are bound to hold most people’s attention til the end!
Paid distribution is super important as well, but how much you can do will likely be limited by your cash resources. You’ll want to think more strategically about where your highest-converting audience is and dedicate most of your budget there. And because there are so many different forms of paid advertising even within one single channel (Facebook has 11 different types of advertisements alone), you want to test every channel and every type of distribution method. Until you know which will give you the highest return, hold back on spending your entire distribution budget.
It’s time to nurture your prospective leads! If your audience has made it this far down the marketing funnel, your marketing efforts are paying off. Nurturing is one of the harder stages, but luckily, it’s quick and easy to measure. If you’ve done a successful job nurturing, you’ll see it in conversions. What those conversions are are up to you — you might want sales, social shares, contact information, you name it. But the completing of a desired action means your video is accomplishing exactly what you want it to.
If you’ve seen ads appear at the top or right of search engines, then you already know what SEM is. When your ads display in these optimal, highly visible positions, your business can have an edge over your competition. Plus, most searchers only click on the first few results, which gives these premium ad spots a visual advantage to catch the attention of your future customers.
Part of what makes SEO unique, fun and challenging is that we get to be like detectives on the web. We have to be good at pulling data from different places and getting that data no matter what it takes sometimes. Some new ways have come about lately for doing so. We’re going to walk step by step through nine specific ways you can collect data more effectively.
We recently published an infographic on how powerful video will become. But the future has already arrived. This has been a full-on video revolution year for marketers. According to Wyzowl statistics, 63% of businesses have started using video content marketing. Out of those 82% of businesses feel video marketing is an important part of their strategy. Video is progressing rapidly and will reach new heights sooner than we think. This trend is fueled by 83% of businesses believing that video marketing gives them a good ROI.
Submit website to directories (limited use). Professional search marketers don’t sub­mit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. A better and faster way is to get links back to your site naturally. Links get your site indexed by the search engines. However, you should submit your URL to directories such as Yahoo! (paid), Business.com (paid) and DMOZ (free). Some may choose to include AdSense (google.com/adsense) scripts on a new site to get their Google Media bot to visit. It will likely get your pages indexed quickly.
As we’ve been told by the Google rater’s guide, we ideally want to focus upon building sites that raters might see as involving Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. A recent Google patent told us that it might look at search results to gauge the authoritativeness of pages in search results, and if pages within those results don’t meet a specific threshold of authoritativeness, Google may perform a search on a related query to find other authoritative search results, which could then be blended into search results for that initial query.
Your Brand Persona and Target Audience. When you eventually start creating content, you have to know who you’re talking to and tailor your brand voice to appeal to them uniquely. If you aren’t targeting the right audience (those people who will lean in to hear what you’re saying), you won’t find success. And, if you can’t find a way to stand out, you’ll blend into the hordes of other brands competing for attention in your industry.

SEO (search engine optimization) for organic search: SEO is a free method of SEM that uses a variety of techniques to help search engines understand what your website and web pages are about so they can deliver them to web searchers. These techniques include things like using titles, keywords, and descriptions in a website and webpage's meta tags, providing relevant content on the topic, using various heading tags (i.e.

), and linking to and from quality online resources.

If Google finds two identical pieces of content, whether on your own site, or on another you’re not even aware of, it will only index one of those pages. You should be aware of scraper sites, stealing your content automatically and republishing as your own. Here’s Graham Charlton’s thorough investigation on what to if your content ends up working better for somebody else.
Brunson talks about this reverse engineering in his book called, Dot Com Secrets, a homage to the internet marketing industry, and quite possibly one of the best and most transparent books around in the field. Communication is what will bridge the divide between making no money and becoming a massive six or seven-figure earner. Be straight with people and learn to communicate effectively and understand every stage of the process and you'll prosper as an internet marketer.
When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam. Nofollowing these user-added links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site.
When it comes to video for SEO, descriptions are everything. Why? Well, descriptions allow Google’s search spiders to make sense of your video and understand what the content entails. So ensure that your videos are tagged with relevant keywords and fully explained with fleshed out descriptions and unique titles. Keep this rule in mind: if it has a box, it has a purpose – Google needs you to fill it out to help you rank.
Don’t cry. That’s what a video marketing platform is for; specifically, one like Vidyard that integrates with YouTube. Your YouTube presence can drive viewers to your site, where they’ll engage with you further. Through the platform, you can gain analytics on who’s watching what, for how long, and what that means for your content, and for your bottom line. It’s easy, too. Uploading, editing, distributing, and managing videos is a snap all from one central location.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) - While SEO is free, pay-per-click ads are just as they sound; ads you run on a search engine that you pay for each time someone clicks on it. In PPC advertising, you bid the amount you are willing to pay per click. In general, the more you bid, the higher your ad will llikely appear in the search engine results. Google AdWords ​has implemented an additional factor in which your ads are ranked based on the relevancy or importance that Google places on your site, which is very difficult to manipulate. You can also use pay per click advertising to your advantage on your own site. For example, you can make money with Google AdSense and other similar programs.